Aharon Appelfeld's THE IRON TRACKS is a novel of despair, revenge, and hope. It describes a journey back along the railroads of Europe by a Jewish survivor of the European Holocaust who is in search of the concentration camp commander who murdered his father. It is also a journey back to a past that can have meaning in the present. A world of Jewish myth begins to shine unexpectedly in this dark tunnel even as the survivors begin to disappear and the hope of revenge and closure becomes more and more remote. The cruel irony of Appelfeld's sardonic vision of Jewish assimilation is softened by the sense of attachment to a landscape of childhood and the reawakened messianism among the victims who have survived.

Leon Wieseltier's KADDISH is an original in every sense of the word. A brilliant, erudite, and uncompromising work of scholarship, it is also a sensitive and moving chronicle of a son's year of mourning his father. Each section takes us on a sweep of history, theology, and philosophy, opening up worlds of previously unexplored knowledge about the origins and meaning of the Kaddish prayer. To the hand, the book feels like a prayer book. For the mind and heart, it provides a deep and lasting spiritual journey.